Edward D Hoch

In every monthly issue since May 1973, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine has featured a short story by Edward D Hoch. Hoch, who has died after a heart attack aged 77, was perhaps the last heir of the penny-a-word scribes who pounded out a living in pulp magazines. He published nearly 1,000 short stories, primarily mysteries, in the few fiction magazines that survived the demise of the pulps.

Born in Rochester, New York, Hoch was educated at the local university. He began writing in his teens but did not sell his first story until 1955, to Famous Detective Stories, one of the last pulps. Called Village of the Dead, it featured Simon Ark, a 2,000-year-old Coptic priest who had been cursed at Christ's crucifixion. With the death of the pulps, Hoch sold to magazines such as Argosy, which was transformed into a "men's adventure" magazine, but primarily to the monthly digest-sized mystery magazines which took their titles from famous characters such as Ellery Queen or the Saint, or from Alfred Hitchcock, then the king of mystery on American television. His first sale to Ellery Queen MM was in 1962, with 450 more sold to that magazine in subsequent years. In recent years he was a frequent contributor to original paperback anthologies, as well as being reprinted in collections.

Hoch also wrote five novels, including The Blue Movie Murders (1972) ghosted for the Ellery Queen pen name, but he preferred short stories, and "the exhilaration" of finishing a story in a couple of weeks, rather than waiting several months before concluding a novel. He wrote primarily traditional whodunnits that were puzzles for the reader to solve along with the sleuth. Hoch pointed out that for the father of the mystery, Edgar Allan Poe, the story was "the only medium", as it was for Conan Doyle and GK Chesterton. Whereas a novel would grow in the writing, as Graham Greene observed, the plot of a short story was usually already worked out in the author's mind.

The key to his productivity was a stable of series characters, including Ark, which allowed him to find a setting for any idea which evolved into a plot. He was a particular master of the locked-room or "impossible murder" story. Often these stories starred Sam Hawthorne, a small-town New England physician, as his sleuth. Hawthorne, like most of his characters, aged along with the series, providing Hoch with opportunities to trace changes in society over the years. His locked-room stories were often homage to John Dickson Carr, but with more than 120 of them, he passed Carr's 100-story output years ago. Like Carr and Queen, he often wrote variations on earlier puzzles, sometimes multiple ones, including a solution to the vanishing of James Phillimore, a problem mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes canon but never explained.

Hoch won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for The Oblong Room (1967), featuring Captain Leopold, whose police procedurals often recall Ed McBain's 87th Precinct. Nick Velvet, a Saint-like professional thief, featured in the ultimate locked-room tale, Theft from an Empty Room. Other series characters included Michael Vlado, a Gypsy king; Jeffrey Rand, a British spy; and Stanton and Ives, two recent college graduates who fly around the world as couriers. Sometimes, the characters' names reveal Hoch's intentions: Sir Gideon Parrot (pronounced Par-row) is an affectionate homage to Agatha Christie's Poirot and Carr's Dr Gideon Fell. The mystery writer Barney Hamet (recalling Dashiell Hammett) solves killings at crime conventions, including one in Hoch's first novel, The Shattered Raven (1969).

Some of his best stories come from his historical series. Alexander Swift is an agent for George Washington, sent to root out a traitor at West Point, then commanded by Benedict Arnold. Ben Snow is a turn-of-the-century cowboy whose yarns combine westerns with mysteries. Occasionally, Hoch's characters interact: Snow meets a young Hawthorne in one story; Nick Velvet appears in The Theft of Leopold's Badge; and Vlado and Rand encounter each other in The Spy and the Gypsy. His remaining three novels were a science-fiction series featuring The Computer Cops, published in the 1970s.

Hoch was a frequent editor of mystery anthologies and a popular guest at conventions. He was named a grand master in 2001 by the Mystery Writers of America. His stories have been collected into at least 15 anthologies, and with posthumous publication, he still might crack the 1,000 mark.

He is survived by his wife Patricia.

· Edward Dentinger Hoch, writer, born February 22 1930; died January 17 2008